


Walter Sykes Can Suck Claudia Donovan's Hairy, Nonexistent Balls

by winged_mammal



Category: Warehouse 13
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-18
Updated: 2011-12-18
Packaged: 2017-10-27 11:42:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,838
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/295469
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/winged_mammal/pseuds/winged_mammal
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Thirty years after 'Stand,' Claudia shows two new agents around Warehouse 14, and demonstrates the effect of one of the more recently created artifacts in their possession.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Walter Sykes Can Suck Claudia Donovan's Hairy, Nonexistent Balls

**Author's Note:**

> A Myka/HG fic without either Myka or HG. In this universe, everything that happened in Emily Lake/Stand happened, and stayed that way.

It was strange, escorting new agents through the Warehouse without Artie around.

For that matter, so was the fact that _she_ was the new Artie.  They'd been co-Arties for fifteen years, after the old man finally realized he really shouldn't be going out chasing after artifacts with his knee problems, and it had been fun.  Or at least as fun as it could be to work in a Warehouse that wasn't _their_ Warehouse, that didn't have the memories or the history or the sheer amounts of _stuff_ that it should.  It never could be home like good old Thirteen had been, but now, after so many years, she could contemplate that fact with fond nostalgia rather than the aching, soul-sucking melancholy that had been her constant companion for so long.  For the most part.

But she was the sole Artie now - had been for just under two years.  The dude had been _old_ when he finally died.  Old enough that they all suspected some weird Warehouse juju had extended his life somehow, especially since it wasn't like he was the old-and-decrepit kind of old when he passed - at his own leisure, thank you very much, no freaky artifact interference at all.  He was just... wizened.  He had known when it had been time, and even as Claudia and Vanessa sat beside his bed in steadfast denial he'd just given them one of those ridiculously hairy eyebrow waggles, shrugged, and smiled.

Vanessa.  At least there she knew why the woman was still hanging around way past a normal human life expectancy.  Claudia still didn't know why the doc had been chosen over her as the new Caretaker - she'd asked, certainly, but there must be some top priority mystery-wrapped-in-an-enigma clause in the job description, because Vanessa - everyone else called her Dr. Calder, but that never sounded right to Claudia, not mysterious sounding enough like _'Mrs. Frederic'_ had been - had never been very forthcoming about it.  But the why was irrelevant, she supposed.  Whatever the Regents want, the Regents get.

Hence her two new charges.

"So, where are the other thirteen Warehouses? Ooo, I bet there's one under that giant rock in Australia. That thing's too weird not to be something _weird_."

Claudia resisted the urge to smile at how much Joseph reminded her of Pete. The Regents certainly had a type, it seemed. Burly, cute in an overgrown manchild kind of way, but if his service record way anything to go by, certainly damn good at his job. He was younger than her, obviously, but seasoned enough to have been in enough life-threatening situations to make the transition to Warehouse life a little easier to handle - they both had. They weren't young enough to be her kids, either. Thank _god_. She dreaded the day she got an agent she couldn't say that about. She'd probably have to go have a long conversation about it with a tub of ice cream or something.

"This is the only one. It's the fourteenth Warehouse in history, hence the moniker."

Alex looked warily at the shabby-looking elevator Claudia guided them into on the way down to the storage level. She'd wanted to install handholds like the turbolifts in the original _Star Trek_ , but Artie had put the kibosh on that. Maybe she'd do it anyway now, as part of her planned celebration of the seventy-fifth anniversary of its premiere. Alex didn't look to be the sort who could appreciate such awesomeness, though. Too stuffed-shirty.

"What happened to the thirteenth?"

It was a natural question. Claudia couldn't suddenly decide to hate Alex for asking, but damned if that wasn't her instinct. "It's a long story." She closed the grate of the elevator and punched the down arrow, setting it on its rickety fifty-foot journey - it wasn't even thirty years old, yet, but she'd insisted the engineers keep the aesthetic of Warehouse 13 when constructing this new one. It just seemed appropriate.

Alex and Joseph were quiet, apparently expecting more of an explanation that Claudia really did not want to give. She sighed. "Ask Zoë or Andrew when they get back. I don't want to talk about it."

Her other two agents were currently in Kentucky, hunting down a silver mint julep glass that would make you bet on _anything_. She'd gotten the ping when a man wagered ten grand on a horse whose rider was fifty pounds overweight then on the way home bet a police officer that he could shoot the cap off his head using the officer's own gun. They'd identified what the artifact in question was fairly quickly, but apparently the act of drinking from it was what caused the problems, and had to pass through his system, as it were. It was proving a bit of a hassle to wrangle the man into isolation in the meantime.

The elevator came to a shuddering halt and she stepped aside, bowing as she made a grand sweeping gesture toward the rows of shelves. "Your stop, lady and gentleman."

Joseph stepped out, closely followed by Alex, and their eyes swept across the room, taking in the sheer magnitude of it. Most of the shelves were empty, of course, but a cavern as large as that in Thirteen had been carved out and filled with the necessary infrastructure to accommodate any and all artifacts that would be recovered in the future. The Regents had decided that the 'sociopolitical landscape' of the planet had changed enough to make it unnecessary to relocate the Warehouse to the reigning superpower since no single one really existed or likely would in the future, so saw no reason not to plan for a long stay in an IRS storage facility in South Dakota that as far as anyone outside of Warehouse business knew had never been destroyed, let alone rebuilt.

Still, they had been busy the past thirty years, and the first shelving units of aisles one through seventeen were covered in artifacts. It wasn't yet enough to warrant anything other than a chronological filing system based on date of retrieval, but, judging by the looks on Joseph and Alex's faces, it was certainly enough to inspire no little awe. Those shelves were _tall_.

"Are all of these... artifacts?" Alex's mouth was hanging open slightly as she took a few hesitant steps forward. They had seen all this from the balcony outside the office earlier, but really, there was no sense of scale from that distance. This was much more visceral and immediate and ridiculously -

" _Awesome_."

Claudia did smile this time as Joseph finished her thought. "That it is, my friend." She started toward aisle one, stifling an internal giggle when the other agents automatically followed. That authority thing _never_ got old. "These are the artifacts we've gathered since the Warehouse was built, all six hundred thirty-seven of 'em."

Alex frowned. "Is that it? Only twenty a year?"

"Trust me, you won't be calling twenty artifacts a year 'only' anything after a couple months." She flashed them a grin, then slapped the side of the neutralizing station at the end of aisle eight.

"All right, now, this is your basic artifact neutralization station, your new best friend. If you've got some serious artifact weirdness going on, just drop it in the vat, or pick this thing up..." She brandished the spray nozzle in the air. "And spray the shit out of it. Don't ask me how it works, 'cause I don't know. And whatever you do, do _not_ get silly string in the gears of the processing center."

They looked exactly as confused as she thought they should. Joseph raised a tentative hand and she nodded at him. "Why do they need to be neutralized? What do these things _do_ , exactly?"

"You know all that stuff that everyone's always told you is impossible? Basically that." Idly noting a small electricity ball darting down section five of aisle seven, she spun around and continued on to their destination. "An old friend of mine once said that in the Warehouse, there's no such thing as no such thing. You might want to think about getting that tattooed on your foreheads."

"Do you guys have Bigfoot?"

"No, but we do have the Patterson-Gimlin camera, the one that shot _the_ Bigfoot video. It turns people into the costume they're wearing."

The footsteps behind her stopped, and she turned around to see Alex and Joseph staring blankly back at her. They looked vaguely disturbed as her mouth split into a wide grin. "I told you, there's no such thing as no such thing. Now come on, and I'll show you our archival system."

They turned the corner on aisle one. These were the first artifacts they retrieved after the new Warehouse was built, and a few they had in their possession when Thirteen was destroyed. Item number one, recipient of her customary rueful gaze: Johann Maezel's metronome.

The oversized crate pushed against the wall across from shelf 1-1 seemed to catch Alex's attention, and she moved toward it. "What's this?"

"Don't touch those!" Claudia lightly smacked away the hand that was starting to reach into the box. "Those are all the chapsticks that are lost in the world every day. Somehow they get keyed in to the Warehouse - I don't know where they were in the time between Thirteen and Fourteen, but when this one was finished, we came in to find the floor covered in them."

Alex raised an eyebrow. "What do you do with them?"

"We melt them down and use them for lubricant in the processing center. You touch them while they're still in that box though, you'll get greasy skin like teenagers only have nightmares about."

"And I guess you-"

"Why did H.G. Wells have a _locket_?"

Joseph's brow was furrowed as he leaned in closer to the artifact that Claudia really, _really_ wished their organizational scheme hadn't wound up putting at eye level. Her jaw clenched as she watched Alex join him, peering over his shoulder.

"Really? How would he have made an artifact?"

"She," Claudia quietly corrected, stepping up to the shelf's archival display and calling up the data for item number twenty-three.

"What?"

"H.G. Wells was a woman."

" _What_?" Alex stared at her again. Claudia stared right back, arms crossed.

"It says here that it 'causes unbearable grief.'" Joseph looked back at her from his inspection of the display. "What does that mean?"

"Exactly what it says on the label, what else do you think?" Fingernails dug into palms as she tried desperately to calm her temper. They didn't know, they _couldn't_ know where this artifact came from, not yet. Don't blame them for asking, they're just doing their -

"I don't see how a locket that somehow causes grief can be that big of a problem."

Claudia resisted the urge to punch Alex, but it was a near thing. Her fist connected with the shelf below the locket instead, nearly causing Rachel Maddow's yellow highlighter to fall to the floor.

"Try it on, then."

Again with the blank looks. "Excuse me?"

Artie would probably have a few choice words for her right about now, but dammit, if this woman was going to work here, there were a few things she needed to understand first. "I said, try it on."

"I thought we weren't supposed to touch the artifacts," Joseph offered.

"I saw you touch six artifacts on the way over here." Claudia shot him a glare, and he looked appropriately chagrined. "And you're going to have to learn not to underestimate these things sometime. I'd rather it be here, in a controlled environment, than out in the field where someone might take advantage."

Alex exchanged glances with Joseph, searched Claudia's face as if to determine whether or not this was a test, and hesitatingly reached out for the locket. Her thumb ran over the bronze plating before letting it dangle by its chain as she lifted it over her head and down around her neck.

The anguished howl that burst from Alex's throat as the locket fell to rest against her skin brought her to her knees, and Claudia's eyes wrenched shut at the memory of the nearly identical cry she had heard the day the locket was discovered to be the artifact that it was. The woman before her now was shorter than Myka had been, her hair lighter, her voice deeper - but the raw misery and the gut-wrenching sobs, those were the same.

"What the hell?" Joseph knelt next to her, clutching her shoulders. "Get that thing off of her!"

A detached part of her mind noted his protectiveness of his partner and approved of it; the rest struggled to drag itself enough out of the past to lift the locket over Alex's head and return it to its stand. Behind her she heard Alex take a desperate breath, heaving as though having been nearly drowned.

"This locket cost us one of our best agents," she noted absently, and straightened the chain before turning back to them. Joseph looked concerned, while Alex merely sat hunched over herself, still struggling for breath. Finally she raised her eyes, stained with grief and tears, to meet Claudia's. It was the look of a woman who'd been to hell and back and didn't know how she had survived, and as she held her sorrowful gaze for long seconds, Claudia knew that she understood.

Alex swallowed a few times, testing out her voice. "Who died?"

"H.G. did," Claudia answered tonelessly.

"So..." Joseph had settled down on the floor next to Alex, and was now darting confused glances between her and the locket. "H.G. Wells died, and the... energy of his - her death affected the locket? Is that right?"

A bitter smile crossed Alex's lips. "No," she said with certainty. Though the artifact imbued no knowledge to the wearer, Claudia knew the type of grief it did cause was horribly specific. Of course Alex knew he was wrong.

"H.G.'s locket..." Claudia started, staring at it as her throat caught. "Was held in the hand of the woman who loved her while she watched, unable to do anything, as H.G. sacrificed her own life to save hers."

"And that pain," Alex whispered, "was what created the artifact."

It wasn't a question, but Claudia nodded anyway. "We didn't find that out until almost two years later, though. Myka... she'd been functioning, getting by like we all were because we had to. When the Warehouse was rebuilt, and we could start to relax, she finally let herself grieve. I don't know if it was more for the fact that H.G. was dead, or that they'd never even really gotten to be together, but she was..." Depressed. Inconsolable. She didn't mention that the same had applied to her at the time, about Steve. Intellectually she'd known the others had been right to convince her that bringing him back with the metronome would have been the last thing he wanted, but that didn't make it any easier to have not gone through with it.

She waved her hand, begging off finishing the sentence. "Anyway, eventually she seemed to come to terms with it, as much as she could be expected to, at least. Then I guess one day she decided to wear the locket and... I could hear her scream from the road outside the B&B. It took us two hours to figure out an artifact was affecting her, and it was the locket, and to finally get it off of her. It was her only connection to H.G. She didn't want to let it go for anything, and I think Pete still has the scars from trying."

Alex shuddered, and Claudia drove the point home. "You wore it for fifteen seconds, and it's still affecting you. Try to imagine having it around your neck for two hours, making you feel the worst emotions a human can feel, and it's _your_ grief, from the worst moment of your life, being amplified and fed back to you." She glanced back at the locket, then turned off the data display.

"Myka retired the next day, moved back home, and we only saw her once after that, for my birthday. She said anything connected to the Warehouse just took her back to those two hours, and I certainly can't blame her for not wanting the reminders."

Only the ever-present hum of the Warehouse broke through the silence as Joseph and Alex processed what she had told them. Then:

"Why weren't they ever actually together?"

"How the _fuck_ was H.G. Wells alive at the same time you were?"

Claudia bit off a sharp bark of laughter at Joseph's question, her eyes screwed up against the moisture that was finally building behind them. She sighed, running a hand through her hair as she joined them on the floor, and proceeded to tell them everything about Myka Bering, Helena G. Wells, and the most depressingly unfulfilled love story she had ever known.


End file.
